Happy new year to you! 
Here are 5 Tourism Marketing Trends for 2019!

​Trend 1: The rise of Instagram for tourism.
Instagram has grown at a much faster pace than Facebook has in the past. It’s a great visual platform for tourism businesses and by learning how to use Instagram ‘properly’, including the use of hashtags, you can reach and keep in touch with customers in an effective way. 

Trend 2: The growth of Google Reviews (and Google bookings).
​You will have noticed the increase in Google Reviews and Google Local Guides. The advantage of this is that everyone uses Google and it’s a good to have an alternative way to review to Tripadvisor. Google has offers online booking - you can book directly from the operator's Google Listing through one of the existing Online Travel Agencies (OTA's). Google clips the ticket.
Oh, and did you know that Tripadvisor is going ‘social’ too? Late last year, they launched their own social media platform. I won’t go into too much detail here, but to be honest, I’m not sure what to think of it and whether it will take off.

Trend 3: The increased importance of content marketing.
Content marketing has been growing in the last few years, but now businesses are becoming more strategic about it. Content marketing involves developing quality and unique content that will benefit your customers. Think about imagery, blogs, videos (virtual reality/360 degree videos) etc.
By developing a content strategy (rather than posting random ad-hoc content) for your website, social media, blog etc, you will have quality material that will encourage your customers to book you, share your content and follow you. User-generated content (USG) is when your customers’ photos for example are shared on social media. UGC is hugely powerful and should be a part of your content strategy.  

Trend 4: Mobile marketing & the growth of voice search. With between 75% and 80% of visitors using their smartphone while on holiday, the growth of voice search has grown too. Paying more attention to the mobile user experience and speed is important – how does your mobile site perform and is it optimised for voice search. 
We’ll also see the growth of payment methods such as Alipay, Wechat pay and Whatsapp pay.

Trend 5: Direct marketing. More and more hotel chains world-wide are using direct marketing to reach customers as their share of bookings (and thus paying more commission) to Online Travel Agencies (such as booking.com and expedia) has grown so much. Many hotels are focusing on direct marketing to their customers and I believe it’s hugely important that smaller accommodation and activity operators do this too. Don’t forget that you don’t control what’s happening on social media. What you do control are your own customer databases. 

Do you need help with your business and marketing strategy? Do you want to learn and keep up to date? Then check out the new Tourism Business Success Programme and the new Agritourism Success Programme.  Go to www.smartraining.co.nz for more info!

Did you know that around 40% of adults use google voice search on their mobile every day (and the younger demographic even more)? 

Google also recognises where you are. So, if I do a voice search: "Where can I find a Mexican restaurant?", Google gives me the Mexican restaurants in Queenstown (as this is where I'm based).
Or: "What are the local walks?", Google gives me a list of websites where walks are listed. 

Voice search is growing at a fast pace and it's important and easy to optimise your website content for voice search.

Here are a few tips:

• Ask yourself: What would my customers ask google to find my business or want to know about my business?
• Add a FAQ page (frequently asked questions) to your site with the types of questions your customers would ask
• Use a conversational tone in your website content
• Longer phrases or questions are common, compared with the shorter searches in text search.
• People use voice search mainly for local content and information, so make sure your Google listing is up to date (opening hours too!) 
• Try out voice search to find similar businesses as yours and see what comes up!

Till next fortnight, Marijke

As Instagram continues to grow with over 800 million users each month, it's become the go-to channel for brands as customer engagement on Instagram is higher than Facebook.
Did you know that Instagram Stories became more popular than Snapchat just one year after it went live?
Here are 64 tips to help you make the most of Instagram:

NOTE: for the 2017/18 summer, I will be writing fortnightly tips instead of weekly ones. Last summer, I carried out a survey re tip frequency, and many of my readers preferred fortnightly tips in summer as they are busy looking after visitors (in NZ)! 

This week, I've been doing research on this year's marketing trends. I am always reading marketing books, blogs, work with clients and present marketing training programmes. It's interesting trying to find out what's the new trends are for the future.

I just found the infographic above. It compiles trends from 151 articles, so I thought you would find this interesting!
Over the next few weeks, I'll discuss several of these trends more in-depth - the ones that I think are relevant to your business.

Till next week, Marijke

Are you active on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

One easy way to make your website more interactive, interesting and up to date is by embedding social media widgets. With this I mean for example a live Facebook, Instagram or Tripadvisor feed.

So instead of just displaying the Facebook or Instagram logo, your website visitors will see your latest posts. It also encourages them to LIKE you, which is what you want!

Do you want to know how to add this to your website? If you have a good content management system, you should be able to do this yourself. Otherwise, get your webmaster to do this for you!

Here are the links with instructions on how to do this:
For Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/page-plugin
For Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/developer/embedding/
For Tripadvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.co.nz/Widgets 

Till next week, Marijke

20 April 2016: Tourism Marketing Bootcamp Queenstown: learn all about the latest tourism marketing trends.
Don't miss it! A few places left!
Click here for more info!